My research explores how consumers’ moral cognition, particularly in the domain of animal agriculture, is conditioned by access to information and powerful cultural narratives.

I. How does harm perception shape consumer moral cognition?

Moralization can powerfully impact even well-established industries by highlighting harm associated with industry practices; however, when harm is obscured or unknown, moralization may be inhibited. We explore how awareness of harm facilitates or inhibits moralization of dairy, a major commercial sector associated with tradition and comfort, and test the effectiveness of an information intervention on moral concern for cows — and how this concern trades off with concern for farmers.

  • Gilbert, I. & Niemi, L. (2025). Moralization at the market: Exposure to facts about industry practices alters moral concern. SSRN. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5287581

  • see also Gilbert, I. & Niemi, L. (forthcoming). Empathy and animal agriculture. In D. Cameron (Ed.), The edges of empathy: Interdisciplinary moral psychology. Palgrave Macmillan.

II. Why are smiling animal mascots effective meat marketing tools?

Psychological research finds that willingness to eat meat is decreased by cues of animal mind and sentience. Why then are smiling animal mascots so effective for marketing meat? In these studies, we test several potential mechanisms and find that mascots appear to increase positive affect and perceived consent — particularly among consumers who more strongly endorse gendered stereotypes about meat consumption (i.e., meat-masculinity attitudes).

  • Gilbert, I. & Niemi, L. (in prep). Animal mascots and consent in meat marketing.

III. What moral and social values underpin dairy industry discourse?

Across several projects, I use mixed-methods approaches — corpus-assisted ecolinguistics as well as multi-modal discourse analysis — to explore how dairy farmers linguistically and visually represent their industry on social media. I attempt in this work to document the social and moral values instantiated in institutional dairy narratives.

  • Gilbert, I., Poole, R. & Niemi, L. (2024). The sociomoral construction of the dairy industry on social media. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 22(1) 286–313 [link]

  • Gilbert, I. (2021). Framing #Februdairy: An ecolinguistic analysis of dairy-industry discourse on Instagram. Southern Journal of Linguistics, 45(1),50–75. [link]

IV. How do consumers make moral judgments about industries and industry outcomes?

This work explores how people perceive industries as moral agents, compared with other kinds of organizations, and how responsibility for harm is attributed across complex causal chains in industrial contexts. Across studies, we show that these are sensitive to information about outcome (help vs. harm) as well as organizational reputation.

  • Gilbert, I. & Niemi, L. (in prep). Who is accountable for the market? The perceived moral agency of industries and firms.